Pocket Queue 42

How To Think
Some ideas as to why an inner city school in Brooklyn has been excelling against other American private schools when it comes to chess.

The Ice Sculpture Business
If you ever wanted to know about the Ice Sculpting business, then this is the article to read. The writing is a bit dry, but the topic is obscure enough to capture my attention for the entire article.

Last year, Bayley and his team built a truck out of ice for a Canadian Tire commercial. The final product weighed eleven thousand pounds, set a Guinness World Record as the “first propelled ice creation to drive,” and garnered attention from every media outlet imaginable. “In all my advertising years, I’d never seen anything get so much publicity,” laughs Bayley. “People from all over the world were calling us.”

Once Donaldson had to double for a thirteen-year-old paperboy who rides a bike across a wooden bridge that collapses. The bridge was already built when he arrived on set, forcing him to fall seventeen feet into eighteen inches of water with his arms out. Had the bridge been moved a short distance, he would have fallen into four feet of water, no problem. But there was no time (read: no money). It took three days of walking the bridge and sizing it up before he knew he could do the stunt. “My thinking was if I walk away with a broken arm, chipped tooth and broken nose, I’ll be lucky,” he recalls. He had to do the stunt twice. The first fall nearly knocked him out. Dazed, he got up right away to do it again before he lost his nerve.

“TV is super quick,” he told me. “My quickest thing I did, I did a Russian rap song in two and a half hours,” he said. “They used it. And that was in Russian. I don’t speak Russian. I had to find a Russian rapper to rap on it.” This was for the CW show Nikita, and his two-and-a-half hour effort resulted in three months of rent.